Spatial Narratives of Contested Historical Sites
Site/Archive/Computation
Researcher: Eytan Mann, Ph.D. candidate
Advisor(s): Prof. Aaron Sprecher, Prof. Alona Nitzan Shiftan
This research aims to develop an innovative framework to re-contextualize architecture, its multiple interpretations, and narratives as a means for a deeper, more comprehensive preservation of architectural heritage. While digital preservation technology has enabled new forms of architectural analysis, information management, and knowledge dissemination, it lacks a framework for a more complex and comprehensive view of the past. The research methodology generates new informational links between oral and visual sources. This method will promote an unfolding of multiple, sometimes overlapping, spatial narratives – stories inexplicably linked to the experience of being at the site of their occurrence. The proposed project aims to develop a method to collect, store, communicate, and visualize the multivalent fabric of perspectives relating to heritage sites. To capture a collage-image that includes tangible and intangible materiality in conjunction towards experiential spatial narratives.
Augmented architectural preservation of contested sites consists of a sequential methodology, including data collection, data analysis, and generative interfacing of spatial narratives according to varying parameters and their real-time rendering through Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). Such a methodology
contributes to the leveraging of current models of architectural heritage by bridging tangible and intangible data sets. It advances the deployment of a technological interface that renders architectural heritage sites more accessible to local communities and the public at large. And finally, produces a unique tool to generate multiple narratives on contested sites.